Thursday night a gunman opened fire on an audience of people at a midnight showing of The Dark Knight Rises in Aurora, Colorado. The YouTube video above was taken on a mobile phone soon after the attack. In the clip, people have gathered on the street outside of the Century 16 movie theater. You can hear them speaking with relief to one another that they weren’t in the theater and many are crying. A woman comes out and says she’s been shot, a bloodied man follows held up by a police officer. Few actually run and take cover when they are told to and instead continue to watch as many more viewers run out of the theater and away from the shooter.

In a world filled with villains yet so few superheroes, and now fantastical alter-ego (yes he believed he was Batman's enemy, the Joker) what are we to make of this scene? Did Holmes intend to copy cat literally the Batman reality, turn the Hollywood fantasy into some sort of lurid hyper reality?

Until then, in a world that is filled with media and entertainment that seems SO REAL, how can one identify and separate the two? How can we even come to terms with someone who has decided to violently re calibrate what we always understood to be artful make believe....?